


A Pale Pilgrimage to Ego Death

by cerozer0, cowboyhell



Category: Disco Elysium (Video Game)
Genre: A Worthy End, Art, Art appears best in desktop!, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Loss of Identity, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Sorry mobile users
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-29
Updated: 2020-05-29
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:15:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24357151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cerozer0/pseuds/cerozer0, https://archiveofourown.org/users/cowboyhell/pseuds/cowboyhell
Summary: "The world is vast and swirling like a surrealist painting. Above her are clouds thick enough to taste, painted the same lavender-gray color as the horizon. The sea, which she stands upon with little issue, is as still as a mirror and only rippled by the points where her heels connect with the water. Klaasje has no clue where she is, and that is fine. She is lost, but unafraid. Death follows her like a shadow, after all. What’s scarier than death? Certainly not a quiet, peaceful ocean that she can walk across. Klaasje puts the cigarette to her lips and takes another pull, inflating her lungs with ash."Klaasje wanders across a gray, misty sea and meets a woman with glowing lungs. What awaits her on the Pale's horizon?
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20
Collections: Disco Elysium Big Bang





	A Pale Pilgrimage to Ego Death

Klaasje stands in the middle of a vast gray sea, one million miles away from Elysium. Smoke pours from her lips like language, a constant stream of nicotine and smog, spurred on by the burning cigarette that remains clamped between two calloused fingers. The world is vast and swirling like a surrealist painting. Above her are clouds thick enough to taste, painted the same lavender-gray color as the horizon. The sea, which she stands upon with little issue, is as still as a mirror and only rippled by the points where her heels connect with the water. Klaasje has no clue where she is, and that is fine. She is lost, but unafraid. Death follows her like a shadow, after all. What’s scarier than death? Certainly not a quiet, peaceful ocean that she can walk across. Klaasje puts the cigarette to her lips and takes another pull, inflating her lungs with ash.

Across the sea, far, far away, another figure is approaching. They are featureless in the pale mist, just a slight frame moving with the grace of royalty. Klaasje remembers a line from a Graad novel she read in college: “O’ she combed the aisles and sought the weak, the fearful, the lonely and beckoned them to join her step, one-two, one-two, up into clouds. O’ she welcomed them in her trail, travelers of the Pale.” The novel had been a scathing critique of the Dolorean religion. Klaasje had found it too full of periphrasis to be any interesting.

The figure grows closer until Klaasje can see that it is a woman, swathed in robes of silver and blue. Her chest is awash in white light, brilliant in its absurdity. She is taller than Klaasje, with a long, elegant neck, and hair that shifts in the light she emits. Her face is astoundingly familiar.

“Dolores Dei,” Klaasje whispers. The cigarette between her lips falls, trailing behind it ash like snow, and dies pitifully in the sea below her. Dolores Dei stands a mere fifteen feet away, her face pure of any fear, confusion, hatred. She holds her hands at her side like two sharp knives, poised for protection. For a moment, her eyes rest peacefully on Klaasje’s face. Then, she sees beyond her, expression solemn and all-knowing.

“Miss Oranje Disco Dancer, I presume,” Dolores Dei says in lieu of a greeting, “you seem rather calm, considering your circumstances.” Her voice is an opera in the empty silence of the ocean, loud as a gunshot, beautiful as a pearl. There is something about her that unsettles Klaasje to the core. Dolores Dei’s is almost revolting in her beauty, her stance, her far-away stare. Stress tickles at Klaasje’s fingertips. She slips a hand into her pocket and taps another cigarette out of her carton. She considers the white stick in the palm of her hand, then, more out of a sense of decorum than a wish to share, she offers the cigarette to Dolores Dei. 

“Not too sure about my circumstances right now, Miss Innocence,” Klaasje says, “I’m just… Here.” Dolores Dei smiles vaguely and glides closer, close enough for Klaasje to feel the infernal heat of her. She takes the cigarette from Klaasje’s hand and puts it between her lips, then leans forward. As if compelled, Klaasje pulls her lighter from her other pocket and lights the cherry. She is enraptured as Dolores Dei inhales deeply, her glowing lungs inflating and turning gray, just for a moment, before that crystalline white light returns to wash over both of them.

“You’re traveling, aren’t you, Miss Oranje Disco Dancer,” Dolores Dei hums, exhaling a cloud of lavender smoke, “alone, like always.” Klaasje is reminded of a rooftop, of two men with white rectangles on their arms, of a woman with red hair and trust, of a mercenary with battle scars and baby blue eyes. She left them all behind. She was alone. She is alone. Klaasje lights her own cigarette and chokes down any semblance of emotion with nicotine. The sky above them curls like claws. Thunder crashes eons away.

“Yes… I think I was traveling,” Klaasje says, staring at Dolores Dei’s lungs, “I was getting away from something.”

“Are you sure you aren’t already caught?” Dolores Dei asks around the cigarette. She blows smoke rings effortlessly. Klaasje tries to do the same by forming her lips into puckered “o’s”, but all that streams from her mouth is hot air. She tries to think of Graad literature and awful sex, filling her own brain to the brim with distracting, hateful thoughts. Dolores Dei smirks. “Avoiding the thought won’t make it any less horrific.”

“I’m not captured,” Klaasje says, “I’m fine. I’m here. I don’t have to run anymore.”

“You can’t stay here and you know that.” Dolores Dei ashes her cigarette and Klaasje watches little figures holding guns and sabers and wartime hats form in the particles. The disintegrating battalion collapses into the sea and dissolve into nothing. 

“Where is here?” Klaasje turns her eyes to the sky, “I was traveling… Traveling…”

“Through the Pale,” Dolores Dei says. Her interest is a benign mask, unshifting as she glances from one horizon to the next, “that is how we can meet. Because this place is ripping you apart.” Klaasje tries hard to find the joke in Dolores Dei’s words, but all she can uncover is the faintest hint of pity. Her hands fall to her sides, the cigarette bending between her fingers. Fallen ash infects the ripples below her with starlight. The sky seems to roll with newfound ugliness. Klaasje could see pockmarks, pink as flesh, dotting the thick gray columns in the sky, and the smell of a thousand sinking, bloated bodies rise up from the sea. She dares not to look down. Dolores Dei meets her eye with a gentle expression.

“What… What can I do? To leave this place? To get… Where was I going?” 

“You know the answer to both of those questions,” Dolores Dei takes a long pull of her cigarette and Klaasje watches it vanish between her lips. She then holds out her hand to Klaasje. “Walk with me. I cannot show you the way, but perhaps I can keep you company.”

Klaasje does not take her hand.

Still, they walk side by side, heads turned to the line where the sky and sea connect. Klaasje realizes about three minutes into the journey that Dolores Dei does not actually step, but glide. The water does not ripple as she moves over it as it does for Klaasje, which somehow makes her rather self-conscious. She feels like a clumsy, stupid thing, walking blindly through the gray landscape, making a mess as she goes. The normal, self-protecting grace she desperately clung too had been stolen away from her. Now Klaasje was just another woman, wandering through the pale beside an Innocence who stared at her with evident calculation. She will be discovered if Dolores Dei keeps examining her. The ever-present horror in Klaasje’s heart blooms like algae. Her body creaks and snaps, her graceless limbs stumble, as Dolores Dei watches and tries to rend knowledge from the very marrow of Klaasje’s bones.

“What are you thinking, Miss Oranje Disco Dancer?” Her Innocence asks.

“I can’t trust anyone,” Klaasje had meant to think this, over and over and over until her heart and her brain were in agreement, but some compulsion forces the thought out of her throat like bile. 

Dolores Dei chuckles, jutting her chin forward as her throat moves like a snake. “You’re a very smart woman who has made many stupid choices,” her wrist snaps out, and Klaasje watches an old figurine of a headless mand on a horse appear within her palm. The figurine wavers, another mirage perhaps, and she swears she can see the horse’s hooves stomping against Dolores Dei’s hand. “Miss Oranje Disco Dancer, the people you left behind in Martinaise, did they trust you?”

Klaasje sees them again, the familiar bodies without faces. A building of a man, the leader of a pack of individuals who wished for better lives. A spitfire of a woman, calm and collected, and willing to take her fall. A disco nightmare and his orange shadow. Baby blue jewels inset to a scarred, traumatized face. Blood on the sheets, on the wood floor, in her hair. She never did forget the smell. It clings to her like perfume, this reek of death, and yet those people, Titus, Ruby, all of the Hardy boys tried to stand by her regardless. Was that trust? Or was it pity, or favors waiting to be dealt, or blackmail loaded into a Moralintern pistol. 

“I don’t know,” Klaasje whispers, “I hope not.” 

“You do know. I know you know.” Dolores Dei drops the figurine in her hand. Klaasje is tempted to watch it fall into the sea, but something deep within her cries out to not look down. Ever a follower of instinct, she keeps her eyes locked firmly on Dolores Dei’s delicate wrist. 

“I don’t want to know,” Klaasje says instead, “if I know it might make me…”

“Feel something?” Dolores Dei stops walking and smiles viciously. Klaasje feels her heart stop beating. She is no longer a human, but a statue carved out by the hands of a prodding, playful goddess. Dolores Dei assesses her like a curator now, fingers splaying against her breast as she stops gliding and turns to face Klaasje completely. “We are very alike, you and I.”

“What?” Klaasje can’t meet her gaze, but she can’t look down either. If she were to look down, something awful would happen, that’s what her mind says, that’s what her twisting guts says. Dolores Dei glistens in front of her like a nuclear bomb. Her smile is cathartic and infectious. 

“Why did you do what you did? Ruined those businesses, stole away jobs, became the rot in the system, the wrench in the gears. Why did you do everything you did, Klaasje?”

“I… I was asked to. It was… I thought it would be the right thing to do but–”

“Did you do what you did because you thought it was right or because you wanted to see what would happen once all of the pieces fell into place?”

“No! No, I— that can’t be, I—“

“You and I are alike. We both loved the endless thrill of manipulation. The power that came from lying. We shaped history to our own liking and we _loved it.”_

__

Klaasje turns to Dolores Dei and finds empty air. The pale sea hums. Silence engulfs her, and she is alone again in the gray sky.

“Hello?” Klaasje tries to tamp down the desperation peeling through her voice, but it threatens to choke her like vomit, “Hello? Innocence? Hello?” She runs across the sea, knees trembling, until her legs falter and she realizes that the ocean is trying to engulf her. Each further step is like pulling herself out of mud or clay. The ocean sucks at her legs until she is forced to look down and finally she sees her. Dolores Dei stares up from her reflection, her face twisted into an amalgamation of both herself and Klaasje. 

Klaasje doesn’t scream. Slowly, she raises her hands to her face and watches Dolores Dei do the same. They are perfect mirrors of each other, moving and grasping and tearing at their faces and hair until, finally, Klaasje forces her eyes up to the sky.

“I don’t understand,” she whispers, “I don’t understand. I’m not… I’m not _you_.”

“We both walked with death in our shadows. We both felt the joy of plans working out, the fear of them failing. We used those around us. We felt bad, but only for minutes, we couldn’t wallow. We had work to do. If you were half as virtuous as I, perhaps you could have been the next Innocence,” Dolores Dei says from Klaasje’s reflection, her voice millions of kilometers away, “Katarzine Alaczije, Miss Oranje Disco Dancer, Klaasje Amandou… You are so many people already. Why can’t you accept that you and I are one and the same?”

Dozens of pale arms burst from the sea and grab Klaasje’s arms, legs, hips, hair, throat. Finally she screams and wrestles away from them, but each one she removes is replaced by two more until she is motionless, blind, and mute. They glow with damnable heat. Klaasje grips the wrist of one tight enough to break and yet it holds strong, and she is no longer a woman of flesh and blood but one of fear eternal.

The arms drag her down into the thick water, the sound of it engulfing her like bubbling viscous gore. The arms aren’t rough though, oh no, they hold her delicately, human touch so gentle that Klaasje almost can’t believe it is being awarded to her. Dolores Dei’s words hang in the air like church bells. Something about this nightmare is holy, familiar, warm. And then the water rushes into Klaasje’s ears and she is nothing. 

༄༄༄༄༄༄༄༄༄༄༄༄༄༄༄༄༄༄༄༄༄

Klaasje awakens in a cell. The ceiling, the floor, the walls, the bars, and the hallway beyond her cage are all a pale gray. Sunlight, misty with the dawn, slants through a slit in the wall to her left and beats against her chest, and the spaces between the bars of her cell were thin and damning. There is water in her, sloshing around in all the empty spaces between her ribs and intestines. Her chest aches. Her face is wet with tears, but her expression is calm, calculated. Her journey has come to an end, finally.

At the end of the hall, a door slides open with a grating creak. Expensive footsteps tap against the concrete floor of the prison, approaching her. Two men dressed in Moralitern blue slowly approach her cell. They are silent and shadowed, Death incarnates ready to snatch her away. Still, there is no fear in Klaasje’s heart. She is full of ennui, plagued only by the knowledge that she has disappeared once before. It seems it is her time to disappear again.

Klaasje sits up and presses a hand to her chest. Dolores Dei sits in her shadow. The men loom over her, and finally she agrees with her Pale dreams: Yes, she should have been an Innocence. 

The barrel of the gun smells like a cigarette. Klaasje meets the eyes of her killers, inhales until her lungs burn, and dies in a spray of red and smoke.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! Frankie (cerozer0) here! I want to say thank you to Darel for the wonderful work he has put into organizing this Big Bang!
> 
> I love writing real prosy religious pieces, and cowboyhell's amazing art just exemplified my words so perfectly that I can't be happier with how this turned out. Please check out their Tumblr linked below and give them all the follows. They deserve it!
> 
> We hope you enjoy the story and art!
> 
> Social Medias:  
> cowboyhell:  
> https://cowboyhell.tumblr.com/
> 
> Frankie:  
> https://twitter.com/brankiee  
> https://autofoebia.tumblr.com/


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